Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Pardon the juvenile, Juvenile reference, but I'm still reeling from a catastrophic hard disc crash. Friday my MacBook's hard drive died. It was a quick and hopefully painful death.

Luckily I had most of my movie files, photos, and recipes backed-up on an external drive, but it was still a traumatic experience.

My Mac was covered by the AppleCare service contract, so thankfully I was able to have a new hard disc installed. I'd like to thank the fine folks at the Apple store in downtown San Francisco for their fine customer service.

You have to make an appointment at the "Genius Bar" where their technician (called geniuses) work. Although they provided me with top-notch assistance, as an actual genius, it sort of bothered me that they use that term so loosely. Anyway, after a long frustrating weekend of reinstalling, reloading, reviewing, and reevaluating my career choice, I'm happy to say I'm almost back to normal.

I did lose about a month's worth of photos, so if you see less than stellar pictures in the next few posts, it's because I had to use still frames from the video. I'll leave you with a personal plea to back up your files! Even though I only lost a small amount of content, just the thought of what could have been is enough to make me shudder.

Yikes, this is a potential nightmare of everyone who visits here! I'm certain we all use our computers for tons of stuff, and a crash is always a lurking, dark threat to our enjoyment, and the safety of all that we keep stored on our computers. Our sympathies, Chef John.

I know how you feel. My laptop crashed a few months ago due to a virus/trojan/something...and half a year of photos, notes, word docs, etc., were lost. Learned my lesson: email important worddocs to myself or save them on google, and photos I upload on fotki.com because I can retrieve the original size there, or on myspace/facebook. -- Katia

It's happened to the best of us computer geeks. Luckily today, in the land of gigantic external hard drives, having a hard disk crash isn't so bad. Macs may be expensive and incompatible with nearly every windows game, but at least their customer service is admirable.

I've lost data before, too--it really sucks. I hate plugging things, but Mozy (mozy.com) has a very good service for this very thing. For free, you can backup 2gb of data (automatically done on folders of your choice with their program) or unlimited data for a fee. I tend to back up my major things on my external drive, but mozy is good for folders that I don't back up often (School stuff).

A guy is working at his office and suddenly feels strange chill - he turns around and there is a Grim Reaper standing right behind his shoulder!Guy: "No-not yet. I am still too young to go."Grim reaper: "You hapless mortal, I came for your hard disk."

Hi Chef John. I'm a big fan from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. You were my inspiration to get on cooking courses early this year. My main job, though, is in IT and I own Mac computers, and is that way that I'd like to recommend that you use Time Machine, Apple's backup utility. The only thing you should get is an external drive (which you have).

I'll leave you with a link to the Time Machine info on apple's website: http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/timemachine.html

Sorry to hear this. However, a man in your position should have all his data backed up in multiple sources. Most importantly and online storage source such as your web server, or a seperate storage service. I think google and microsoft and i know many other companies offer cheap file storage. that way if your whohle house blew up (god forbid) all your work would still be available through the interweb. Maybe you should look into it? Some of the better services make it easy too, with syncing software and such.